if you happen to be in chicago next week, i'll be speaking as part of a fine lineup of people (including lewis hyde) at the 'lived practice symposium' at the school of art institute. i go off at 10 am saturday, november 8 at the fullerton auditorium. here's the paper. yes, i will show taylor swift videos, but you will also get a dose of merle haggard. thinking about it, i might be working toward a book on the aesthetic dimensions of identity categories such as race and gender, or an aesthetic account of race and gender and sexuality and so on that would also be a broadening of aesthetics and all its central concepts ('beauty', 'form', 'expression' 'aesthetic experience', e.g.). i guess it would kind of pick up where my (er) best book, political aesthetics, left off.
it's a familiar idea that these things are 'social constructions' but that's just the sketchiest of starting points. how are they constructed? where are they constructed? by whom? (even if they are not entirely or exhaustively social constructions, they surely have very many siocially-constructed aspects or inflections at a given place and time.) if we wanted to know how they are being made right now, where would we look? well we should look in my opinion at the arts very broadly construed: styles of movement and slangs, musics and scents, body adornments and modifications, designs of devices and device interfaces, arrangements of environments: what ranciere calls 'the distribution of the sensible'.